Bruno calls on Business Council to speak out on budget issues

State Senate Majority Leader Joseph L. Bruno, speaking at The Business Council of New York State Inc.’s annual meeting this morning in Bolton Landing, said New York has to be competitive because it needs the tax revenue that thriving businesses can provide.

(Skip Dickstein / Times Union)

He also warned that efforts to close what the Spitzer administration has called loopholes and increase fees would directly impact businesses’ finances.

“Bottom line: You have to compete,” he said, referring to New York’s business climate. “The only way you increase revenue is to help companies grow.

“When IBM makes more money, they pay more taxes, they hire more people,” Bruno added. “Many of you in the biggest corporations didn’t step up” when the Senate majority was seeking to protect businesses from additional costs, he said.

“You have to be willing to step up and speak out because what’s going to be coming at you next year is, they’re projecting a $4 billion plus deficit,” Bruno said.

But state Budget Director Paul Francis said the programs the Senate proposes, including an effort to reduce or eliminate property taxes for localities or protect tax loopholes, have costs that have to be covered.

Earlier, a panel that included Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Clarkson College President Anthony Collins, and Joseph Hammang, a research official at Pfizer, discussed the importance of innovation to an expanding economy.

Atkinson said state investments should be targeted to be effective, and that the recipients should be accountable for results, referring specifically to investments in research at university campuses.

He also said other states had found that boosting their research and development tax credits had been effective in increasing research spending, and that was something New York state might try.

While Ontario had a 20 percent flat credit, New York had a 9 percent credit on incremental increases in research spending. Rhode Island, meanwhile, offers a 22.5 percent credit.

New York did rank well on a number of indicators of innovation, although the figures weren’t broken into upstate and downstate.

But in such critical factors as industry investment in research and development, New York placed 27th. Rhode Island, with its greater tax incentive, ranked second.

Atkinson also suggested that states use corporate tax credits to drive innovation, not to drive down costs.

Collins, meanwhile, said the way engineering careers are marketed to students needs to change, and that the effort has to start far earlier in school because by the third grade, most students are already on a career path.

And Hammang suggested state governments need to be careful about policies that may actually discourage companies from growing, telling of Rhode Island’s efforts to expand its biotech and pharmaceutical sectors at the same time it was licensing Canadian pharmacies to sell drugs in the state so that it could “avoid purchasing medicines from companies like ours.”